"Ladies, gentlemen, and other distinguished guests, the rules to the treasure hunt are simple!" the announcer boomed through her tempest spell. "There are multiple designated areas, divided by age, highest gate, and temperament! Scattered throughout these areas is a variable number of tokens. Collect one of each color, and you pass. The first three people to pass for each category will receive an extra prize, in addition to the participation rewards."

"I'm going to betray you for a single token, I hope you know that," Kene said, smirking at me.

"You were going to wait for a token?" I asked.

Dusk pumped their tiny fist into the air and made a gravel crunching sound, declaring that we would demolish everyone.

We made our way to the section for second gate, eighteen to twenty four, non-injury combat spells allowed. Technically, Dusk was only first gate, but nobody moved to stop her.

"On your mark. Get set. Go!"

The air erupted with mana of every type an instant later. People invoked short range teleports, called on speed enhancing spells, took great leaps propelled by wind magic, glowed with golden auras, sent out webs of divination magic, and a dozen other things besides.

I powered my Analyze Life, Death, and Space spells and started to walk – brooms weren't allowed – forwards, but was stopped when I felt Kene press something in my hand.

I glanced down to see a potion bottle that hummed with a faint green color. Kene was drinking one of their own, so I downed it.

I felt life mana trickle through my body, and in particular, to my legs. As I began to jog again, it felt smoother, easier, and more fluid than it had ever felt before in my life.

"Thanks, my dearly detested traitor," I said, and they gave me a smug grin.

"I know you'd have lost without it. This makes it fun."

The area we had to cover was just over six acres, which is the kind of area that sounds like a lot, until you cram at least a hundred people in it.

Scanning the area, I turned to run towards a more wooded area. That'd probably have a green token, if nothing else.

Dusk let out a chirp that she was going to go off on her own, because she thought she could sense a token buried in the ground.

Before she'd completed the sentence, a telluric mage stomped their foot, and it shot into the air. As they tried to snatch it, I flicked a Fungal Lock onto them, and Kene caught the token out of the air.

Someone sent a bright blue lightning paralytic spell flying at us, but I took it head on with Briarthreads and we got lost in the crowd again.

I paused in the running as I spotted an area where the lifeflows of the grass fed upon the death mana in the earth.

I glanced at Dusk, who wordlessly hopped down and began to shift the earth. Her Move Earth spell was slower than the pure telluric version, but it exposed the bones well enough for me to snatch up a black token.

"Finally caught up to me?" Kene asked, grinning as they flashed the token they'd snatched out of the air.

I sighed. I'd hoped he'd have gotten a green one.

I scooped up Dusk and we entered the thicket of trees. I carefully swept my mana senses over the area, relying on the tenuous lifesense that ingraining Analyze Life had granted me.

There were a couple of spots in the high branches that I thought might have indicated they'd been reshaped to hold a token, but I was no good at climbing.

As Kene started to shimmy up a tree, I knelt to examine the shrubbery. Right as I was about to nab a token, it vanished from my sight in a warping of the lines of space.

I whipped around in the direction the bend had come from to see a woman decked out in Mossford University themed clothes.

I flicked a Fungal Lock over her, but she just winked and teleported twenty feet backwards.

I debated giving chase, but she was already running. She was also clearly a second gate spatial mage, so she could probably escape anyways.

I went back to searching the shrubbery, until a token fell on my head.

"Thought you may find that useful," Kene said, holding up their green and black tokens.

"Thanks," I muttered before we took off towards the center of the field.

Someone fired off a purple orb spell at us from one side, and I barely deflected it in time with Briarthreads. I turned to see a towering, nearly seven foot tall man with a beard that made me extremely jealous. He had to have been on the upper end of what was allowed in this bracket.

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With my eyes, it would have been easy to think of him as a violent brute. To my mana senses, there was a different story.

Fine threads of knowledge-based divinations floated through the air around him, and the orbs had been condensed desolation mana.

He released two more purple spheres at me, and I reinforced Briarthreads to hold, then layered two Fungal Locks on him.

I blocked the first orb, but the second one punched through. When it hit my skin, my entire body went numb, and my mind began to swim foggily.

It was incredibly disorienting, and I almost fell over, but Kene caught me and began to cast healing spells on me.

That was dangerous, but…

My thoughts snapped into place, and I flared Briarthreads around us, just in time to block a sphere headed for Kene.

I focused and condensed my death mana to equal my life mana, then layered three Fungal Lock spells on him in rapid succession.

With the spell no longer unbalanced by the stronger life mana, it had a much stronger effect on the mage.

Technically speaking, Fungal Lock shouldn’t have affected his ability to aim the orbs. Regardless of if they were aimed by his will – as I suspected – or via locking onto targets like Fungal Lock or Pinpoint Boneshard, it could be done via only mana manipulation.

But people used structure to guide their magic all the time, often without thinking about it. Flicking your fingers at an enemy in order to guide your will, gesturing to direct a levitation spell, holding out your hand to engage a shield… There are tons of ways people do it.

I do it too, and I’d even seen Orykson and Meadow doing it. I wasn’t sure if it was simply human nature, or what. Given how strong they were, they probably could cast just fine without using any sort of structure, and simply never bothered to get rid of the habit.

This mage was not Orykson or Meadow. His next volley of disorientation spells was slow, crude, and easy for Kene and me to dodge. Kene tossed a potion at his feet, and a plume of gas swept into the air.

The mage struggled for a few seconds, then went limp. I dashed over to him and began to rifle through his pockets, looking for his tokens.

He had three – a yellow, green, and white token. I left him with the green token, since I’d already collected one, and tossed the white to Kene, who tossed me a red one.

“Where’d you get that?” I asked curiously.

“Two appeared in my pockets while I was healing the disorientation effect,” Kene said with a shrug. “I figure it’s probably a theming thing.”

I turned red, and turned to prevent them from noticing. We began to run, when a voice rang out over the knoll.

“The first victor for this area has been found!”

Primes, that was fast!

A meteor of a hammer smashed into the ground in front of us, and I leapt back just in time. The woman who held it was tiny, but she had to be using strength enhancement spells, because…

There was a pulse of fifth gate spatial mana as she was teleported away

That must have registered as too lethal of an attack for the game. Huh. I wondered how she’d gotten away with it so far?

A small part of me hoped that her tokens would spill out of where she’d been standing, but we had no such luck.

As we kept moving, Dusk peeped for us to stop. There was a small river nearby, and she used her mana to alter its flow slightly, pulling out a purple token, which she handed to me.

“You know, I’m starting to think that betraying you is looking like a better option,” Kene said with a teasing grin. “If I took your tokens, I’d only need to collect an orange and blue…”

“And what makes you think that you’d actually win?” I asked, winking.

They put their hand over their heart.

“You mean you’d fight your dear, ill-fated, dying date?”

I stuck my tongue out at them, and then promptly tripped and fell over.

There was one minor advantage of my new defensive aura pin – it was a field all around me, which meant that I didn’t wind up skinning my knee or anything.

The downside was that Kene wouldn’t stop laughing. I rose to my feet and turned to see what exactly had tripped me, only to see…

A cat?

Not the gray cat that sometimes showed up at my house.

No, this was a strange looking cat, one I couldn’t even entirely call a cat. It had large, bulbous catlike eyes, along with cat ears, and a cat nose. Its tail looked like the tip of a banana, where you peeled it, and the back part of its body oddly reminded me of a banana as well.

It was like some mad life mage had decided to fuse the two concepts into one, and then released them out into the world.

“Sorry about that!” someone called, rushing over. They had a group of four tiny, two inch long, banana-cats sitting on their shoulder, and they scooped up the large one.

“It’s fine,” I said, though I tensed. They didn’t seem like they were gonna attack, but you never knew…

But no, they simply left, leaving me mildly confused and amused.

I turned back to Kene and we continued our jog, when Kene paused and waved his hand through the air. I frowned and swept my mana senses over the spot.

There was a tiny leak of physical and solar mana in the air, but it wasn’t something I would have picked up on.

Kene finally found the exact spot, and drew out a blue token.

“Nice!” I said, and Kene grinned.

We took off running again, and I came to realize that we’d almost made a complete circuit around the park, and we were near the tents where the volunteers were.

That actually sparked an idea in my head, and I walked over.

“Are you done?” one of them asked.

“No, but I was wondering, do you have a –”

Someone else blurred by me, and the voice rang out again.

“The second victor for this area has been found!”

“Do you have a laborer’s token?” I lamely finished. The volunteer smiled and handed an orange token over to me.

“Smart!” Kene said. “Do you mind if – huh?”

I shoved my tokens into Kene’s hands, then pushed them over the line.

“The third victor for this area has been found!”

I then waved to Kene, winked, and headed out. It took almost twenty minutes for me to finish collecting the tokens I was lacking, and I had to duel a tall woman in a black coat for two of them.

When I finally got back. Kene marched over to me and sighed.

“You didn’t have to do that.”

“I know,” I said. “But I wanted to. What’d you get for the bronze medal?”

They flicked their fingers and held up a small, compass shaped object.

“It’s a broom attachment, allows you to navigate to different points. The cardinal directions, the central teleport beacon, and you can mark another point too.”

“Oh, nice!” I said, nodding. It sounded kind of like the spell that I’d picked up.

We spent the rest of the day touring the remaining attractions before Kene had to head back to his Village in order to begin the work with his grandmother.

That left me alone with a box full of pills, a book to read, and some more mana to whip into shape.